On Wednesday, the luminaries of Silicon Valley convened at Trump Tower for the president-elect’s much-anticipated tech summit. The look on their faces suggested nothing short of despondence. To Trump’s right sat Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Sheryl Sandberg. To his left were, among others, Tim Cook and Elon Musk. As a wide cheshire-cat grin expanded across his face, Trump gleefully noted, “This is truly an amazing group of people.” He aptly continued, “There’s nobody like you in the world. There’s nobody like the people in this room.”

The founders and executives present may have looked on in disbelief, but they should not have been entirely surprised by the bizarre turn of events that had led them into that very room. Silicon Valley, after all, inadvertently facilitated Trump’s rise. For years, Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park featured a rectangular sign that reflected the ambition and spirit of Mark Zuckerberg and his legions of dedicated employees. It read, in bold, red lettering, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Twitter had a similar poster that hung in its San Francisco office, noting “Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow.” These mantras aren’t an anomaly in Silicon Valley’s playground-like campuses. Cubicles, hallways, cafeterias, and meeting rooms are festooned with Rockne-esque white-board-style slogans such as “Done Is Better Than Perfect” or “Fortune Favors the Bold,” or “Don’t Bury Your Failures, Let Them Inspire You.”

These maxims have their value, and they have helped inspire a wealth-generation machine unlike any other in human history. But moving too fast can come with consequences, especially when the mantra is heeded by young people who are often still in their 20s and 30s. In fact, the tech industry’s adherence to an ideology of rapid acceleration helps explain why America finds itself in its current predicament, with hackers reportedly involved in swaying our election and a growing acceptance of xenophobia spreading across the nation. Perhaps many of the people who convened at Trump Tower were so focused on those mottos that they did not realize an outcome they might create.

Illustration by Darrow.

In many ways, Silicon Valley is capable of anything. Google is proudly building cars that can drive themselves, and the company is creating artificial intelligence that can translate Ernest Hemingway’s novels from English to Japanese and back again. On its earnings calls, Facebook has bragged for years about the influence of its news feed for marketers. And this may be why recent events are so discouraging. Google, despite these accomplishments, couldn’t spot a phishing scam in Gmail when some Russian hackers sent a fake Google security message to John Podesta. And it wasn’t until after the election that we all learned that the very same Facebook news feed was used to share thousands of pieces of completely fabricated content.

How is it that a company that manages a network of 1.8 billion people, and one that has algorithms that can spot and remove a picture of a nipple amid billions of photos, can’t detect a ludicrous story declaring that Hillary Clinton is running a secret pedophilia ring out of the basement of a pizza joint. (How the newly appointed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has shared similar stories is another matter altogether.) And then there’s Twitter, which has known for the better part of a decade that its platform was becoming a haven for trolls and hate speech. Perhaps growing the monthly active user base seemed more important.

When I ask people who work at these companies why they can’t fix these particular issues, they often say that “these are hard problems to solve.” Yes, they are, indeed. Most of us couldn’t figure out how to keep Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear out of our e-mail, or build A.I. to identify a fake news story in an ocean of chatter. But we weren’t the ones who created the platforms that birthed these problems; it was Silicon Valley. And, let’s be honest: Twitter and Google and Facebook and virtually every other company in the Valley solves similarly difficult technical problems every single day. It’s enough to wonder if these problems weren’t solved because they weren’t taken seriously enough at the time.

There are several potential reasons these menacing holes were overlooked. But for argument’s sake, let’s presume that the Valley’s leaders, including those who attended Trump’s tech Summit, were simply incapable of envisioning how real bad guys—hackers, propagandists—might subvert their products. This is entirely possible, and I’ve seen this happen before. Specifically, six years ago when I was in a room with the engineers who would eventually build 3-D printers. While we sat there amid circuit boards and melting plastic, I asked the excited inventors what they would make with their new concoction. Their ideas were so cute and innocent, like customized iPhone cases and plastic wall hooks. Yet what was the first thing that people built once they got their hands on a 3-D printer? Guns. (Then came 3-D-printed bullets and semi-automatic machine guns.) The same thing happened with Twitter. The product was conceived to organize a night out with your friends at, say, a rave. A decade later and we have a President-elect who lies, attacks people, and intentionally provokes outrage in 140-character bursts aimed directly at his 17.3 million followers.

If the tech elite had no idea how their innocent products could be undermined, then now is their opportunity to pause and think about the implications of their actions on the future. As companies in Silicon Valley build robots that can run as fast as a cheetah, fleets of cars and trucks that can drive themselves, artificial intelligence agents that can predict weather patterns and respond to global market changes, and flocks of drones that will deliver our packages, maybe it’s time to put more effort into thinking about how to avoid calamitous events from occurring on a larger scale. It’s one thing for Russian agents to hack our e-mails and influence the election. Imagine what they could do with millions of autonomous vehicles that have passengers inside them.

Cynically, however, one wonders if tech companies were subverted not because they couldn’t imagine such dystopian outcomes but rather because they weren’t incentivized to prevent them. As Trump’s campaign noted recently, it spent $50 million in digital advertising and promotions during the election, with a majority of that expenditure going toward social media. Why would anyone in tech want to fix that? Financially speaking, Facebook’s plan to combat fake news could indeed backfire.

Silicon Valley has become the greatest wealth-generation machine in the world for a reason. Tech C.E.O.s, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the engineers who write all the code are generally riled up to get as many users, and as much revenue, as possible. If they don’t, a competitor will topple them. Things move fast in the Valley, often too fast to pause to think about the repercussions. But Trump’s election may change that. As he waved his hands in the air on Wednesday and talked about how “everybody in this room has to like me at least a little bit,” I couldn’t help thinking about those office signs back in the Valley and the world they have wrought. I hope everyone in the room left thinking about a new wall slogan: It’s time to slow down.

Andrew Mason, Groupon

Scorned as the “worst C.E.O. of 2012” by CNBC’s Herb Greenberg, Andrew Mason was at the helm of Groupon when the company went public, an I.P.O. Greenberg wrote off as the “most over-hyped . . . of recent years.” Years after going public, Groupon still has trouble turning a profit.

Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; From Bloomberg (Mason), Robert Kirk/Photodisc (Ticket), both from Getty Images.

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos

Elizabeth Holmes became emblematic of Silicon Valley excess when her $9 billion blood-testing start-up, Theranos, became the subject of a series of Wall Street Journal investigations that reported that the company’s technology didn’t actually work. Theranos is currently under federal criminal investigation.

Parker Conrad, Zenefits

Zenefits C.E.O. and co-founder Parker Conrad resigned in 2016 amid concerns over questions about his $4.5 billion start-up’s regulatory compliance. Further reports insinuated Zenefits’ company culture under Conrad was more frat house than hackathon, complete with allegations of sex in the stairwells and plenty of drinking.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo

Hailed as the turnaround boss Yahoo so desperately needed when she was hired for the job in 2012, Marissa Mayer has come under fire as investors have lost their patience waiting for a miracle that never came. (The millions she reportedly spent on lavish parties and perks, while the ailing Internet giant circled the drain, didn’t help.) Yahoo is now up for sale.

Carly Fiorina, H.P.

When Carly Fiorina was let go from her six-year tenure as C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard, the company’s stock jumped 10 percent upon the news of her firing. While she was C.E.O., Fiorina didn’t increase the company’s profits, and she actually decreased H.P.’s shareholders’ wealth by 52 percent. A disastrous merger with Compaq, which led her to fire some 30,000 employees, haunted Fiorina throughout her failed senate and presidential campaigns, too.

Jason Goldberg, Fab

E-commerce start-up Fab was once valued at $900 million, a near unicorn in Silicon Valley terms. But after allegedly burning through $200 million of its $336 million in venture capital, C.E.O. Jason Goldberg was forced to shutter its European arm and lay off two-thirds of its staff.

Gurbaksh Chahal, RadiumOne and Gravity4

Fired in 2014 from his ad-tech firm RadiumOne following a domestic-violence conviction, Gurbaksh Chahal founded a new company to compete with the one he was kicked out of. But Gravity4, his new firm, was sued for gender discrimination in 2015, though that case is still pending, and former employees have contemplated legal action against him.

Andrew Mason, Groupon

Scorned as the “worst C.E.O. of 2012” by CNBC’s Herb Greenberg, Andrew Mason was at the helm of Groupon when the company went public, an I.P.O. Greenberg wrote off as the “most over-hyped . . . of recent years.” Years after going public, Groupon still has trouble turning a profit.

Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; From Bloomberg (Mason), Robert Kirk/Photodisc (Ticket), both from Getty Images.

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos

Elizabeth Holmes became emblematic of Silicon Valley excess when her $9 billion blood-testing start-up, Theranos, became the subject of a series of Wall Street Journal investigations that reported that the company’s technology didn’t actually work. Theranos is currently under federal criminal investigation.

Parker Conrad, Zenefits

Zenefits C.E.O. and co-founder Parker Conrad resigned in 2016 amid concerns over questions about his $4.5 billion start-up’s regulatory compliance. Further reports insinuated Zenefits’ company culture under Conrad was more frat house than hackathon, complete with allegations of sex in the stairwells and plenty of drinking.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo

Hailed as the turnaround boss Yahoo so desperately needed when she was hired for the job in 2012, Marissa Mayer has come under fire as investors have lost their patience waiting for a miracle that never came. (The millions she reportedly spent on lavish parties and perks, while the ailing Internet giant circled the drain, didn’t help.) Yahoo is now up for sale.

David Byttow, Secret

David Byttow, the founder of anonymous-posting app Secret, pivoted his year-old start-up to an incubator in 2015 after allegedly pocketing millions and buying a flashy Ferrari. Google Ventures investor Bill Maris later compared the start-up shutting down to a “bank heist.”

Michelle Peluso, Gilt

Gilt Groupe, the once hot flash-sales start-up, was valued at $1 billion in 2011, having raised more than $286 million in funding since its founding. Five years later, Hudson’s Bay, the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, purchased it for $250 million in what CNN dubbed the “ultimate flash sale.”

Anthony Bay, Rdio

Rdio filed for bankruptcy in 2015, showing just how hard it can be to make a viable streaming service. Rdio had raised $125 million in funding at a $500 million valuation. Pandora scooped up “many employees” from the failed start-up afterward, though its C.E.O. Anthony Bay did not join them.

Dan Wagner, Powa Technologies

C.E.O. Dan Wagner said that his company’s product, a glorified Q.R. scanner called PowaTag, was going to help Powa become “the greatest technology company of all time.” In February, $2.7 billion Powa shut down after struggling with its flagship product and, according to former employees, Wagner’s own hubris.

Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; From Bloomberg/Getty Images (Wagner).

Adora Cheung, Homejoy

On-demand cleaning start-up Homejoy shut down in 2015 after failing to hold onto its customers. C.E.O. Adora Cheung reportedly didn’t work to fix its retention rates, which flopped as a result of offering $19 flat-fee introductory deals. The “deciding factors” in Homejoy closing its doors, however, were the four lawsuits it faced from workers who claimed they’d been misclassified as contractors. The lawsuits were still pending as of last summer.

Ben Kaufman, Quirky

Quirky, a start-up that sought to crowdsource inventions to the masses, filed for bankruptcy in September 2015. Quirky struggled to raise funding and C.E.O. Ben Kaufman stepped down a month before his company folded. Quirky sold Wink, its software business, to Flextronics for $15 million.

Scott Thompson, Yahoo

Scott Thompson served as C.E.O. of Yahoo before the company hired Marissa Mayer. Months after Thompson was hired to the job, vocal activist investor Dan Loeb sent Yahoo’s board a letter questioning Thompson’s credentials and wondering if perhaps Thompson had “embellished his academic credentials.” Thompson was immediately replaced with Ross Levinsohn, after the board discovered Thompson had falsely added a computer-science degree to his résumé.

Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Jo Foord (Kindersley), from Bloomberg (Thompson), both from Getty Images.

Carly Fiorina, H.P.

When Carly Fiorina was let go from her six-year tenure as C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard, the company’s stock jumped 10 percent upon the news of her firing. While she was C.E.O., Fiorina didn’t increase the company’s profits, and she actually decreased H.P.’s shareholders’ wealth by 52 percent. A disastrous merger with Compaq, which led her to fire some 30,000 employees, haunted Fiorina throughout her failed senate and presidential campaigns, too.

Jason Goldberg, Fab

E-commerce start-up Fab was once valued at $900 million, a near unicorn in Silicon Valley terms. But after allegedly burning through $200 million of its $336 million in venture capital, C.E.O. Jason Goldberg was forced to shutter its European arm and lay off two-thirds of its staff.

Gurbaksh Chahal, RadiumOne and Gravity4

Fired in 2014 from his ad-tech firm RadiumOne following a domestic-violence conviction, Gurbaksh Chahal founded a new company to compete with the one he was kicked out of. But Gravity4, his new firm, was sued for gender discrimination in 2015, though that case is still pending, and former employees have contemplated legal action against him.